Adrian Parr’s Blog

A couple of months ago I purchased Colin Moock’s Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend DVDs (Course 1 and Course 2). Basically, these two O’Reilly training DVDs were filmed over a weekend with Colin Moock, Hoss Gifford and James Paterson. They cover as lot of the material featured in Colin’s Essential ActionScript 3.0 book, but it is well presented in an informal and easy to digest manner. The training is broken up in to small, easily digestible chunks, which make it great to watch when you have a spare ten minutes here and there.

The video files provided on the DVDs are regular FLV files, and can be played back through the provided Flash Projector. Or, as I have done, convert the FLV files to MP4 (I used the now sadly discontinued VisualHub) and copy them across to your iPhone. This is a great way to improve your ActionScript 3.0 knowledge whilst on the bus or train.

I also purchased the electronic version of Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser which comes in three formats (Mobi, PDF and ePub). The ePub version can be viewed on your iPhone using the free Stanza App (if you have a Kindle then the Mobi format will work well). I was pleasantly surprised how clear the text is and how easy it is to read on the small screen. Stanza works well and allows you to navigate around the sections, change the font size and colours etc.

Finally, if you haven’t already downloaded it, go and get Mike Chambers’ ActionScript 3.0 API Reference iPhone App. This puts the entire documentation for AS3 in your pocket. My only gripe is that the length of the line of text is quite long which makes the font become very small and difficult to read. It is a shame the text doesn’t wrap when you zoom in.